While researching how to bring the idea to market, I met a host of creative people and it went from there. Five years ago I started ideas21, a network of creatives and inventors, that helps women and men to realise their creative potential in terms of inventions and innovations. We hold meetings once a month where people, such as Sir Alan Sugar and Sebastian Conran, come and give talks on their own experiences as creative people. Lots of women get involved but it became apparent that they often couldn’t attend an evening meeting because of domestic commitments. So we started Women Invention and Innovation sessions in 2004. The Patent Office lends us space during the day and once a month we provide free 30-minute advice sessions, timed to fit in with the school run, covering everything from intellectual property, to design, licensing and marketing The women are so committed. All 27 slots are usually taken and in a year we’ve had, at the most, three no-shows.
Women may still need a bit more support to fulfil their potential, but they are thoroughly appreciative of a man’s point of view. There are already some great women inventors – and there will be more. The world is much more accepting, encouraging and respectful of women’s creativity than in the past. Linda Oakley runs ideas21, a network for inventors and innovators. She is chair of the Women Invention and Innovation initiative and has been a judge in the British Female Inventor of the Year award NO Not necessarily.
Over the past 20 years, the way women have been portrayed by the media has taken a bit of a rollercoaster ride, and women’s creative potential has not always done well out of it. In some ways, women are expected to behave more like men and women’s creative imaginations may be suffering as a result. I got interested in gender issues in the creative process after looking at “the new man”, advertising and the commercial culture of the 1980s Something happened with men in the late Eighties They opened up to style in a big way. They adopted a consumerist lifestyle that had previously been the preserve of women; one of fashion, grooming and looks The new man was well dressed, sensitive and caring. You could see it in the men’s lifestyle magazines that sprang up. It was as if British men had at last been invited to join an American and European model, the fashion-conscious male with a hint of homosexuality But that’s changing.
